Passenger Pigeon Day, 111 years gone
The Passenger Pigeon memorial at Cincinnati Zoo. ‘ _On 1 September 1914, between midday and 1 pm, in the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, Cincinnati, Ohio, a pigeon breathed her last, and with her died her species._
_The pigeon was known as Martha, and the species was the Passenger Pigeon. Amongst all extinctions, this example remains unusual in two respects: the precision with which the timing is known and the overwhelming abundance of the species just a few decades earlier – for, just a few decades before Martha died, the Passenger Pigeon was the commonest bird on Earth._ ‘ Those are the first two paragraphs of my book on the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon (published 2014 – it seems a long time ago). I think of the Passenger Pigeon often, but always on this day of the year.
_**A Message from Martha: the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and its relevance today**_ by Mark Avery is published by Bloomsbury. See reviews – click here.
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